BUSINESS

HBO’s upcoming ‘Harry Potter’ show sparked backlash on social media, with fans mocking the show’s resemblance to the original films.

The national average 30-year fixed mortgage rate has risen for the fourth straight week, according to Freddie Mac. The 30-year rate is up 0.16% this week to 6.38%, resulting in a 0.4% total increase in March.The average 15-year fixed mortgage rate is up for the third consecutive week. It is currently 5.75%, a 0.21% jump since last week.During my years reporting on mortgage rates, I’ve seen that even one small rate increase can make people hesitant about getting a new home loan. And a more substantial, ongoing increase like this one is bound to affect the housing market.Mortgage rates have increased over the last several weeks, leading to fewer mortgage applications. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending March 20, week-over-week applications decreased 10.5%. Mortgage refinance applications dropped by 15%.Americans are undoubtedly hoping for mortgage rates to trend downward as we head into the spring home-buying season. But are lower rates on the menu?Middle East conflict keeps mortgage rates highThe U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran on Feb. 28, which drove up the price of oil, the 10-year Treasury yield, and — you guessed it — mortgage interest rates.“Three weeks into the conflict in the Middle East, mortgage rates are still driven by the volatile, elevated price of oil, especially in a week where there’s not much economic data to move the market,” said Jeff DerGurahian, chief investment officer and head economist at loanDepot.Related: Redfin reveals major shift in housing marketHigher oil prices typically lead to higher inflation, which affects the 10-year Treasury and mortgage rates. The day before the attacks on Iran, Brent crude closed at $72.52 per barrel, per Business Insider. As of March 25, Brent crude closed at $102.22.Even if conflict in the Middle East calms down, mortgage rates might not fall right away.”If tensions do ease, rates won’t improve overnight,” DerGurahian said. “We could begin to see some positive movement as it will take time for oil production, shipping capacity, and broader market conditions to normalize before that relief fully works its way through to mortgage pricing.”Federal Reserve decisions could push up mortgage ratesThe fascinating — and in this case, frustrating — thing about economics is how intertwined everything is. The Middle East conflict drives up oil prices, which impacts inflation. And inflation plays a role in the Federal Reserve’s decision about whether to cut the federal funds rate.”If oil stays elevated long enough, it starts to create more real inflation concerns,” DerGurahian said. “This has now put rate hikes back in the picture over the Federal Reserve’s next four meetings, which is obviously a very different conversation from before.”More on mortgages and mortgage rates:Home-buying costs are 4 times what buyers expectFannie Mae predicts shifts in mortgage rates, housing marketFinancial influencer shares if buying a home is a waste of moneyAt the Fed’s March 17-18 meeting, the central bank indicated that Americans could expect one fed funds rate cut in 2026. This Fed decision’s impact on mortgage rates would likely be minimal, causing rates to stay flat or inch up a bit.But Wall Street now thinks there may be no rate cut at all in 2026. In fact, the Fed could even increase the rate.The CME FedWatch tool currently forecasts that the fed funds rate will remain unchanged at every Fed meeting this year. It’s also starting to increase the likelihood that the Fed will increase its rate by a quarter-point in future meetings. At the time of publication, the tool puts the chance of a rate increase at 28.2% for the September meeting and 31.7% for the October meeting.If investors anticipate a fed funds rate increase, mortgage rates will probably go up in the weeks leading up to that meeting.Strategies for getting a lower mortgage rateIf you’re hoping to buy a home this spring, you’re likely unhappy with the recent increases in mortgage rates. Thankfully, there are ways to lock in a lower interest rate, even in a high-rate environment.Consider an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM). These keep your rate the same for a predetermined amount of time, then change the rate periodically. The fixed intro-rate period is typically lower than what you’d get with a fixed-rate mortgage.Buy discount points. A mortgage discount point is a fee you pay for a reduced mortgage rate. One discount point usually costs 1% of your loan principal, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and lowers your rate by 0.25%. You’d pay more at closing but have a lower rate for your entire loan term.Look into mortgage rate buydowns. A buydown is similar to a discount point, but it’s temporary rather than permanent. Buydown terms depend on the mortgage lender, but a common program is the 3-2-1 buydown. Let’s say you get a mortgage with a 6.5% rate. The rate would would be 3.5% for the first year, 4.5% the second year, and 5.5% in year three. Then it would lock in at 6.5% for the remainder of your term. Shop for mortgage lenders. Each lender charges different interest rates and fees. According to a study by Freddie Mac, homebuyers could have saved as much as $600 per year on their loan had they gotten rate quotes from two mortgage lenders. Those who received at least four quotes could have saved more than $1,200 yearly.Related: Financial influencer warns homeowners about this mistake

DRW founder Don Wilson says public blockchains conflict with how institutions trade and manage risk, limiting adoption.

TheStreet aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.Why we love this dealLugging around a traditional toolbox with heavy wrenches and hammers inside can be backbreaking business. Instead of creating more work for yourself, consider investing in a toolbox on wheels with an extendable handle, so you can roll your equipment effortlessly alongside you. These mobile toolboxes aren’t just practical for a handyman’s power tools, as they’re also perfect for organizing the DIYers’ crafting supplies, creating an emergency go kit at the workplace, and so much more. The one downside to a mobile toolbox is that they’re often expensive, but Amazon is making a top-rated selection more affordable during its Big Spring Sale. This annual savings event offers sitewide savings, which include an unbeatable deal on the DeWalt Modular Rolling Toolbox with 45% off. The premium toolkit typically retails for $119, but this markdown brings the price down to just $66. The gear is part of the DeWalt Tstak Storage Collection, so it’s compatible with the brand’s other stackable organizers. This allows you to securely stack any additional Tstak compartments on top of this rolling toolbox for even more convenience.DeWalt Modular Rolling Toolbox, $66 (was $119) at Amazon

Courtesy of Amazon

Shop at AmazonWhy do shoppers love it?Designed for superior performance, this large-volume toolbox is equipped with sturdy 7-inch wheels, so you won’t get stuck on curbs or bumps. The smooth-gliding wheels provide excellent maneuverability from the home to the garage to the worksite and more. It even comes with a push-button opening that simplifies grabbing your tools, but for added security, you can also utilize the rust-resistant metal latches on each side. Of the thousands of shoppers who have rated this home improvement gear, 79% of them have given it a perfect five-star rating. Given these figures and the reliability of the DeWalt brand, you can feel confident in its quality. “It is durable, and it keeps everything where it needs to be,” one shopper wrote, who also highlighted that “it organizes well.” The toolbox also comes with an organizing tray to quickly access your smaller items. Related: Amazon is selling a $199 DeWalt cordless vacuum for $129, and it’s perfect for DIY cleanup”It has great storage capacity, and it is very versatile,” raved one shopper. Measuring 20.13 inches long, 17 inches wide, and 39 inches high, the portable toolbox offers ample room for your tools and equipment. This space is further maximized with the extendable telescopic handle that’s built onto the outside, so it won’t eat away at the interior space. The same reviewer continued to praise it, writing, “This would work for files, crafts, or anything that you need to lug around.” Details to know Dimensions: 20.13 inches long, 17 inches wide, and 39 inches high.Does it have a lock?: It doesn’t have a lock, but it does have metal latches for a secure closure.Is it waterproof?: No. The toolbox is water-repellent, but not waterproof.Currently ranking as Amazon’s no. 8 bestseller for tool organizers, over 1,000 of these DeWalt toolboxes with wheels were sold in the past month. This is even more remarkable since for most of that time, the mobile storage wasn’t on sale for the low price of $66. During Amazon’s Big Spring Sale, we’ve found other DeWalt Tstak deals that are compatible with this toolbox and will stack right on top.Shop more dealsDeWalt Extra-Large Tstak Toolbox, $29 (was $39) at AmazonDeWalt Small Parts and Screw Tstak Tool Organizer, $28 (was $35) at AmazonDeWalt Single Deep Drawer Tstak Tool Organizer, $45 (was $66) at AmazonStreamline your tool storage with the DeWalt Modular Rolling Toolbox while it’s on sale for just $66 during the Amazon Big Spring Sale. The savings event will run until March 31, but the new deals will come and go within that time frame, so don’t wait to snag this selection.

The final episode of “Love Story: JFK Jr. & Carolyn Bessette” airs tonight. Here’s what to know about the devastating ending, including the start time and how to watch.

Stocks with little coverage tend to outperform well-known and widely followed peers.

Trump hoped his Iran reprieve would bring a stock-market miracle — but investors aren’t buying and time is short.

Crypto prices and risk assets remain at the mercy of macro headlines for now, one analyst said.

Intercom is taking an unusual gamble for a legacy software company: building its own AI model.The 15-year-old, Dublin, Ireland-based massive customer service platform announced Fin Apex 1.0 on Thursday, a small, purpose-built AI model that the company claims outperforms leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic on the metrics that matter most for customer support. The model powers Intercom’s existing Fin AI agent, which already handles over one million customer conversations weekly.According to benchmarks shared with VentureBeat, Fin Apex 1.0 achieves a 73.1% resolution rate—the percentage of customer issues fully resolved without human intervention—compared to 71.1% for both GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.5, and 69.6% for Claude Sonnet 4.6. That roughly 2 percentage point margin may sound modest, but it’s wider than the typical gap between successive generations of frontier models.”If you’re running large service operations at scale and you’ve got 10 million customers or a billion dollars in revenue, a delta of 2% or 3% is a really large amount of customers and interactions and revenue,” Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe told VentureBeat in a video call interview earlier this week.The model also shows significant improvements in speed and accuracy. Fin Apex delivers responses in 3.7 seconds—0.6 seconds faster than the next-fastest competitor—and demonstrates a 65% reduction in hallucinations compared to Claude Sonnet 4.6. Perhaps most striking for enterprise buyers: it runs at roughly one-fifth the cost of using frontier models directly, and is included in Intercom’s existing “per-outcome”-based pricing structure for its existing customer plans.What’s the base model? Does it even matter?But there’s a catch. When asked to specify which base model Apex was built on—and its parameter size—Intercom declined.”We’re not sharing the base model we used for Apex 1.0—for competitive reasons and also because we plan to switch base models over time,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. The company would only confirm that the model is “in the size of hundreds of millions of parameters.”That’s a notably small model. For comparison, Meta’s Llama 3.1 ranges from 8 billion to 405 billion parameters; even efficient open-weights models like Mistral 7B dwarf the sub-billion scale Intercom describes. Whether Apex’s performance claims hold up against that context—or whether the benchmarks reflect optimizations possible only in narrow, domain-specific applications—remains an open question.Intercom says it learned from the backlash AI coding startup Cursor faced when critics accused the coding assistant of burying the fact that its Composer 2 model was built on fine-tuned open-weights models rather than proprietary technology. But the lesson Intercom drew may not satisfy skeptics: the company is transparent that it used an open-weights base, just not which one.”We are very transparent that we have” used an open-weights model, the spokesperson said. Yet declining to name the model while claiming transparency is a contradiction that will likely draw scrutiny—particularly as more companies tout “proprietary” AI that amounts to post-trained open-source foundations.Post-training as the new frontierIntercom’s argument is that the base model simply doesn’t matter much anymore.”Pre-training is kind of a commodity now,” McCabe said. “The frontier, if you will, is actually in post-training. Post-training is the hard part. You need proprietary data. You need proprietary sources of truth.”The company post-trained its chosen foundation using years of proprietary customer service data accumulated through Fin, which now resolves 2 million customer queries per week. That process involved more than just feeding transcripts into a model. Intercom built reinforcement learning systems grounded in real resolution outcomes, teaching the model what successful customer service actually looks like—the appropriate tone, judgment calls, conversational structure, and critically, how to recognize when an issue is truly resolved versus when a customer is still frustrated.”The generic models are trained on generic data on the internet. The specific models are trained on hyper-specific domain data,” McCabe explained. “It stands to reason therefore that the intelligence of the generic models is generic, and the intelligence of the specific models is domain-specific and therefore operates in a far superior way for that use case.”If McCabe is right that the magic is entirely in post-training, the reluctance to name the base becomes harder to justify. If the foundation is truly interchangeable, what competitive advantage does secrecy protect?A $100 million bet paying offThe announcement comes as Intercom’s AI-first pivot appears to be working. Fin is approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue and growing at 3.5x, making it the fastest-growing segment of the company’s $400 million ARR business. Fin is projected to represent half of Intercom’s total revenue early next year.That trajectory represents a remarkable turnaround. When Fin launched, its resolution rate was just 23%. Today it averages 67% across customers, with some large enterprise deployments seeing rates as high as 75%.To make this happen, Intercom grew its AI team from roughly 6 researchers to 60 over the past three years—a significant investment for a company that McCabe admits was “in a really bad place” before its AI pivot. The average growth rate for public software companies sits around 11%; Intercom expects to hit 37% growth this year.”We’re by far the first in the category to train our own model,” McCabe said. “There’s no one else that’s going to have this for a year or more.”The speciation and specialization of AIMcCabe’s thesis aligns with a broader trend that Andrej Karpathy, former AI leader at Tesla and OpenAI, recently described as the “speciation” of AI models—a proliferation of specialized systems optimized for narrow tasks rather than general intelligence.Customer service, McCabe argues, is uniquely suited for this approach. It’s one of only two or three enterprise AI use cases that have found genuine economic traction so far, alongside coding assistants and potentially legal AI. That’s attracted over a billion dollars in venture funding to competitors like Decagon and Sierra—and made the space, in McCabe’s words, “ruthlessly competitive.”The question is whether domain-specific models represent a durable advantage or a temporary arbitrage that frontier labs will eventually close. McCabe believes the labs face structural limitations.”Maybe the future is that Anthropic has a big offering of many different specialized models. Maybe that’s what it looks like,” he said. “But the reality is that I don’t think the generic models are going to be able to keep up with the domain-specific models right now.”Beyond efficiency to experienceEarly enterprise AI adoption focused heavily on cost reduction—replacing expensive human agents with cheaper automated ones. But McCabe sees the conversation shifting toward experience quality.”Originally it was like, ‘Holy shit, we can actually do this for so much cheaper.’ And now they’re thinking, ‘Wait, no, we can give customers a far better experience,'” he said.The vision extends beyond simple query resolution. McCabe imagines AI agents that function as consultants—a shoe retailer’s bot that doesn’t just answer shipping questions but offers styling advice and shows customers how different options might look on them.”Customer service has always been pretty shit,” McCabe said bluntly. “Even the very best brands, you’re left waiting on a call, you’re bounced around different departments. There’s an opportunity now to provide truly perfect customer experience.”Pricing and availabilityFor existing Fin customers, the upgrade to Apex comes at no additional cost. Intercom confirmed that customer pricing remains unchanged—users continue to pay per outcome as before, at $0.99 per resolved interaction, and automatically benefit from the new model.Apex is not available as a standalone model or through an external API. It is accessible only through Fin, meaning businesses cannot license the model independently or integrate it into their own products. That constraint may limit Intercom’s ability to monetize the model beyond its existing customer base—but it also keeps the technology proprietary in a practical sense, regardless of what the underlying base model turns out to be.What’s nextIntercom plans to expand Fin beyond customer service into sales and marketing—positioning it as a direct competitor to Salesforce’s Agentforce vision, which aims to provide AI agents across the customer lifecycle.For the broader SaaS industry, Intercom’s move raises uncomfortable questions. If a 15-year-old customer service company can build a model that outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic in its domain, what does that mean for vendors still relying on generic API calls? And if “post-training is the new frontier,” as McCabe insists, will companies claiming breakthroughs face pressure to show their work—or continue hiding behind competitive secrecy while touting transparency?McCabe’s answer to the first question, laid out in a recent LinkedIn post, is stark: “If you can’t become an agent company, your CRUD app business has a diminishing future.”The answer to the second remains to be seen.

The bank said institutional unwinding and weakening liquidity have hit precious metals, while bitcoin shows steadier flows and improving momentum amid geopolitical stress.